Hong Kong's Art Basel: tussle between money and culture

International art fairs are multiplying like billionaires – and the gallery owners showing at Hong Kong's Art Basel were hoping for rich buyers, writes Katrina Strickland.

Visitors take photos of the hyper-realist sculpture 'Untitled (Kneeling Woman)' created by Australian artist Sam Jinks during the VIP preview of the Art Basel Hong Kong art fair on Friday, March 13, 2015. Art Basel stages modern and contemporary art shows and is held annually in Basel, Switzerland, Miami Beach and Hong Kong.
Kin Cheung

by
Katrina Strickland

At every art fair there's the party to be at, and at Art Basel Hong Kong this year, that party was staged by the Swiss cigar company Davidoff.

Held at the pool house and grill on the roof of the Grand Hyatt, the party celebrated excess in, well, excess. Hundreds of guests sipped on free-flowing French, grazed on food ranging from paella to sashimi and prawn cocktails, and watched Dita Von Teese strut her glamorous, risque stuff.

But what made it really feel like a scene from The Wolf of Wall Street were the cigars; most of the male guests were smoking them, along with a good swag of the female guests – all with a look of "I can't believe we are able to do this" glee on their faces. The cigar bar on the way into the party was a heady place, manned by staff who were cutting and lighting the fat brown imports as quickly as guests were stepping up to take them off their hands. It was surprising not to see Leonardo diCaprio standing by the pool, surrounded by a bevy of topless women.

It was galling, nerve-racking and thrilling. Galling, because it felt so starkly at odds with the breadline life of so many artists, and such a counterpoint to last year's Occupy Central protest movement.

Art Central 2015, Hong Kong. This was its first year as a satellite fair to Art Basel on the island city.
supplied

Nerve-racking, because with so many cigars, so many people and so much excitement in the air, the very act of pushing through the crowd came with the risk – thankfully avoided – of having a lit cigar accidentally shoved in one's face.

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And thrilling, because who doesn't get a voyeuristic charge from stepping into that kind of hedonistic world every now and again? It doesn't happen too often in Sydney.

Davidoff was one of a host of international brands massaging the thousands of collectors, gallerists, journalists and – yes, artists – who flew in to the Chinese outpost just over a week ago for Art Basel Hong Kong. The fair opened on Friday the 13th with a VIP preview and wrapped up on Tuesday night, when the weary staff who had manned stalls for 233 galleries from 37 countries and territories got to pack up and have a quiet champagne of their own.

Mood-only works

Among the highlights were some of the works designed not to be sold but to create a mood. These included 20 large-scale installations scattered through the fair by Australian curator Alexie Glass-Kantor, and a 10-minute light work projected nightly onto West Kowloon's International Commerce Centre by the Chinese artist Cao Fei. Standing on a balcony at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre where the fair is held, looking across the water to the ICC building and glittering lights of Kowloon, viewers were instantly taken back to the Pac-Man games played in greasy fish and chip shops and arcades through the 1980s. Those who were old enough to remember greasy fish and chip shops, anyway.

The iPhone was ubiquitous. Sydney gallery Sullivan + Strumpf almost needed security guards, such was the crowd gathered each day at its stand, most taking pictures of its hyper-realist sculptures by Melbourne-based artist Sam Jinks. Another Sydney-based art dealer, Andrew Jensen, was bowled over by the way many people look at art in 2015. In his case, sculptures by artist Sam Harrison attracted the most iPhone clicks.

"If we took a levy on photographs we could have retired," he says with a wry laugh. "It is extraordinary how mediated through a lens experiences have become."

Most of those taking photos were what those in the trade derisively refer to as "tyre kickers"; that is, lookers not buyers. Art fairs are curious beasts in that they need the hordes to create an atmosphere and to appear successful, but the sales that make or break the participating galleries come from only a tiny percentage of visitors.

Thus while gallery staff watch nervously to ensure the iPhone brigade don't knock any artworks off their plinths or walls, they are also eagle-eyed for visitors there not to take pictures but to spend thousands of dollars. And desperately hoping they stop by their stand.

German performance artist of Turkish origin, Nezaket Ekici creates an artwork during the opening of the Art Basel art fair for a VIP preview in Hong Kong on March 13, 2015. Hong Kong's biggest art fair, Art Basel, opened its doors to an expected thousands of visitors over five days.
Philippe Lopez

This was the third iteration of the Hong Kong fair since it was sold to one of the globe's most successful art brands, Art Basel, which has run fairs in the Swiss city of its name since 1970 and in Miami in the US since 2002. Art Basel now has a firm foot in Asia, one of the growth regions for a global trade in art and antiques that, according to the TEFAF Art Market Report 2015, topped €51 billion ($70.7 billion) in 2014. China equalled the United Kingdom in accounting for the second-biggest slice of this record turnover, at 22 per cent, behind only the US at 39 per cent.

March better place on fair calendar

European ownership has brought with it a decision to move the fair from May, when it has been held every year since its founding in 2008, to March, when it was held for the first time this year. A welcome upshot for visitors was a cooler climate; for organisers and participants it was a better place on an annual calendar crammed with 180 big art fairs.

In May, Hong Kong butted up against the Frieze Art Fair in New York, the Venice Biennale this year and Gallery Weekend in Berlin, plus the main, mega Art Basel fair, which rolls around each June. In March, Art Basel Hong Kong competes only with the relatively new Art Dubai and the very old Maastricht fair, the latter not such a problem because it focuses on historical artworks in contrast to Art Basel, which is all about the contemporary. The shift in dates resulted in 29 more galleries participating, of which 20 came from Europe and the US, with more collectors coming from the northern hemisphere too.

That the fair is helping to transform Hong Kong from a city obsessed with money into one with a cultural as well as financial scene is not in doubt, although some query how deep the change is outside of what has now been dubbed Art Week, and whether it isn't still all about money – namely, the sale rather than the appreciation of art.

Michael Lynch, the Australian who is outgoing chief executive of the giant West Kowloon Cultural District, hopes that when the multiple arts venues in that $HK22 billion ($3.7 billion) complex start opening over the coming years, it will change the balance.

"Progress has been pretty extraordinary over the last four years, [but] the thing that concerns me is too much of it is fundamentally market driven," he says. "The importance of building new cultural institutions, as we are doing, is that you will get some restoring of the balance between the public and the private."

Swiss art dealer Dominique Perregaux, who first opened a gallery in Hong Kong a decade ago, also strikes a word of caution about extrapolating too much from fairs. "The city's cultural scene has not changed much; Hong Kong has just become an art trading hub," he says. "Once a year, Art Basel brings in the names you would never otherwise get to see. It's very important to see those works in Hong Kong, but in terms of intrinsic culture, nothing much has changed."

A visitor peers into US artist John Baldessari's 'Beethoven's Trumpet (With Ear) Opus # 133' at Art Basel Hong Kong on March 15, 2015. Asia's biggest art fair opened its doors to thousands of visitors for the city-wide canvas of creativity and commerce.
Anthony Wallace

Permanent spaces in Hong Kong

That said, a lot of big international galleries have opened permanent spaces in Hong Kong in recent years, including White Cube, Gagosian, Pace, Galerie Perrotin and Simon Lee. There are new developments every year – last year's included PMQ, a joint venture between the government and some philanthropists in which the old "police married quarters" building has been transformed into a hub for local designers, who pay subsidised rent for studios and small shops.

A satellite fair, Art Central, made its debut this year, a 10-minute walk from Art Basel Hong Kong. If anything speaks of the pace of change in Hong Kong it is the walk between the two fairs, alongside a giant construction site full of cranes.

The founders of Art Central started Art Hong Kong back in 2008 before selling it to the Swiss, among them Tim Etchells, who also founded the one-year-old Sydney Contemporary and has the contract to manage the Melbourne Art Fair. Etchells sees the establishment of Art Central, which sits above an affordable art fair but below the Art Basel stratosphere, as another step in Hong Kong's cultural evolution.

Rebecca Hossack, a London-based, Australian-born art dealer who showed this year in Art Central, is all for it. "These mega fairs are monstrosities, half way through the first floor you're thinking 'get me to the VIP lounge and champagne, I can't go on'," she says with a flourish. "At Art Central it's a much more human experience and you can look at art in a non-commodified way."

The establishment of a satellite fair is good news for Australian galleries, not all of which are accepted by Art Basel. Those hosting stands at Art Central this year included M Contemporary, Metro Gallery and Connie Dietzschold.

As someone who spent 18 years living in Asia before moving to Australia and opening her Sydney gallery in 2013, M Contemporary owner Michelle Paterson sees attending such fairs as mandatory. "We need to make our artists internationally known, Australia is too small a market," she says.

Art Basel Hong Kong was attended by about 60,000 people this year, 5000 fewer than last year, partly accounted for by running for a day less this year and in a new month, while Art Central notched up about 30,000 attendees. Sales are never independently verifiable and are without fail promoted as fabulous.

Foot traffic brisk

With those riders in mind, foot traffic at both fairs was brisk, particularly at Art Basel, and the atmosphere upbeat in both places. Art Basel's PR team put out a daily summary of who'd sold what, some of the highlights including an Andreas Gursky photograph at Spruth Magersfor €400,000 ($560,000), a Sean Skully painting at ShanghART for $US850,000 ($1.1 million) and a Chen Cheng-po painting at Liang gallery for $US1.3 million.

The benefits of returning year in, year out are paying off for Australian galleries Sullivan + Strumpf and Anna Schwartz – the latter had her property developer/publisher husband Morry on hand to help sell works by the likes of Daniel Crooks, Rose Nolan and Shaun Gladwell.

"This year we noticed a lot more Europeans, a lot of French collectors – Swiss and German," Sullivan + Strumpf co-director Ursula Sullivan says. "At the moment we price in Australian, US and Hong Kong dollars, but next year we'll have to add euros."

Davidoff is one of a handful of sponsors lured to Hong Kong by the Art Basel juggernaut, others include UBS and BMW, all of which leverage their art relationships in ways the Australian arts sector can only dream of. Aside from hosting parties par excellence, Davidoff has art programs ranging from residencies and grants for artists from the Caribbean and the Dominican Republic, to putting artworks on limited edition cigar boxes.

UBS funds a Junior Art Hub offering children free art sessions (while mum and dad are presumably off spending thousands in the fair), an app that collates art news from global media and a menu at the Mandarin Oriental's Pierre restaurant inspired by works from the UBS Collection.

This year BMW selected three artists from the emerging art section of Art Basel Hong Kong to lodge proposals for a BMW Art Journey. The winner will get to go on "the journey of their dreams" – presumably in a Beamer – which will be documented online, in print and on social media.

If this all sounds like a co-opting of art by commercial interests – well, it is. But it has arguably ever been thus, just to a much lesser extreme. The creation of art has always depended on the patronage of someone.